As we continue our exploration of anxiety, we thought you would enjoy the above video by Will Smith on Skydiving, plus the excerpt from Darren Hardy's book "The Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster."

“Oddly, it’s not even calling a stranger or making a speech that generates our fear, it’s the anticipation of doing it—which is, once again, an illusion of the mind.

In the 1960s, a researcher named Seymour Epstein got curious about skydivers. He fitted novice parachutists with heart rate monitors that measured their pulses as their plane climbed toward the release point. He found that—as you might expect—while still safe inside the plane, a jumper’s heart rate got faster and faster as the plane ascended. The higher the plane went, the higher the anxiety.

What he didn’t expect to find, however, was that once they threw themselves out the door of the plane and started hurtling toward the Earth with only a few thin cords and a glorified bedsheet to keep them from impending doom, their heart rates declined dramatically, and they admitted to quite enjoying themselves.

The most stressful part of the entire experience was the illusion of how frightening the event would be, or, in other words, the anticipation of fear. Once the reality of the event took over, the fear vanished.”

– Darren Hardy

from The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster

We love this. As the skydivers go further up and up in their plane, their heart rates match their ascent.